


My Eyes Now Clear, The Call Begun

by Captain_Aurinko



Series: the magnus archives au [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives, The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: ALSO THERE'S LIKE SO MUCH ART FOR SUCH A SHORT THING??? READ IT TO APPRECIATE THE ART, Juno Steel Character Study, LOOK ILL BE WRONG I CAN'T TAG ALL OF THE CHARACTERS SO JUST ASSUME THEY'RE ALL IN THERE, M/M, TMA AU, i know we all expect this to be eye focused but we're avant-garde here, this is just entity roulette, with special guest stars web and corruption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:01:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24592714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Captain_Aurinko/pseuds/Captain_Aurinko
Summary: Hyperion was a rotting city, and nowhere was more thick with the stench of it’s decay than Oldtown. There was violence in the streets, and behind closed doors. Work was scarce, and the work that did exist was dangerous, poorly paid, and unglamorous. Buildings were poorly constructed, and so was the education given to the children who were unlucky enough to grow up there. The corrupt politicians who lived comfortably in Minerva Heights had already written off Oldtown entirely, and the small allotment of funds that Oldtown was meant to receive had long since depleted into a trickle as it lined the pockets of every official it passed through.AKA - what if the TMA powers existed in the TPP universe.
Relationships: Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel
Series: the magnus archives au [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1755451
Comments: 22
Kudos: 71





	My Eyes Now Clear, The Call Begun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aesphantasmal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aesphantasmal/gifts).



> Read this in Jonny Sims voice. You won't be dissapointed, I promise.

For as long as Juno Steel could remember, spiderwebs had appeared in the corners of his life. If he had given much thought to it, he would have thought that it was strange that he never saw any spiders, or any insects trapped in them. Being a completely man-made colony, without much influence of nature, Hyperion City shouldn’t have had many spiders at all, and yet the webs permeated every aspect of life. If one could peel back the city’s skin, revealing the meat and bone beneath, they would find the webs, binding it all together in a pale, sticky gauze. 

The webs were present in Juno’s earliest memories, back in Halcyon. They followed him and Ben and Sarah, filling every corner as soon as their backs were turned. Sarah hired exterminators, but they never found anything. Sarah Steel didn’t like that. Ben and Juno would stay upstairs and hide, trying not to think about their mother downstairs, screaming into her comms about how  _ useless _ everyone was, that she might as well burn the house down because no one else was doing anything to help her get rid of the damn things.

Juno didn’t think about how the webs showed up more often after some of Sarah’s friends came over. 

If anyone asks, tell them Turbo did it!

There were less cobwebs in Oldtown, but between the rising flames behind his mother’s eyes and the dangers of Hyperion’s most dangerous district, Juno had other things to keep him preoccupied. 

Hyperion was a rotting city, and nowhere was more thick with the stench of its decay than Oldtown. There was violence in the streets, and behind closed doors. Work was scarce, and the work that did exist was dangerous, poorly paid, and unglamorous. Buildings were poorly constructed, and so was the education given to the children who were unlucky enough to grow up there. The corrupt politicians who lived comfortably in Minerva Heights had already written off Oldtown entirely, and the small allotment of funds that Oldtown was meant to receive had long since depleted into a trickle as it lined the pockets of every official it passed through. 

Any resident of Oldtown would say that they were desperate to get out, but that was rarely true. Certainly sharp, hard-working girls like Sasha Wire might have meant it, but the thing about the corrupting influence of the city was that it didn’t want anyone to leave. It didn’t want anyone to be better. It whispered in the ears of its citizens, promising that a rotting home was better than an unknown future, that the good times to be had were enough to make up for the bad times to come. 

_ Wait a little bit longer _ , it promised Mick Mercury. _ The good times will come again _ . 

_ Don’t leave _ , it hissed in Benzaiten’s ear.  _ There is still goodness beneath the rot, if only you can dig deep beneath the skin and flesh and bones to find it. _

The rot did not need to whisper into the ear of Juno Steel, and he thought that meant he was free. He was proud to leave the rot behind him as he took up a gun and badge at its epicenter, defending a shining exterior riddled with violence and cruelty and lives torn apart. A corruption that creates desolation. It would be a paradox in any other place, but not in Hyperion City.

Juno came home and found his family’s home ablaze. Sarah Steel sat on the front steps holding a gun. She didn’t seem that bothered by the raging inferno behind her. She taunted him with the loss of his brother, the loss that tore into him with teeth and claws and a taste for blood. He asked her why she did it. She said she thought she saw a spider on him. 

In the end, Sasha Wire didn’t get out on her own. When she told Juno she was leaving to join Dark Matters, there were cobwebs in her hair. 

When Juno saw the depth of the corruption he was up against in the HCPD, an organization that protected itself from reproach and ignored the files that went missing, the cameras that would turn off long enough for a prisoner to kill themselves, the bruised and bleeding faces of children who had gotten underfoot in the pursuit of justice, he nearly broke. No matter what he did, no matter how hard he worked, no matter how high in the ranks he rose, he knew he wouldn’t be able to purge the city like he’d dreamed. Without Benten, it was so much harder to believe he ever could. He turned to alcohol, and a few substances that were a bit stronger. 

He started hanging out with a different crowd. A wild, free, destructive crowd with enough power to do some damage and enough money to not worry about the consequences. First and foremost among them were the Kanagawa twins. Cass was his favorite. Her eyes were bright and her teeth were sharp. She could be wild and reckless, but she also had an intensity to her: a sharp, focused, predatory energy that reminded Juno of following leads and chasing suspects. Cassandra brought out a viciousness in him that made him uneasy to look back on. Her brother Cecil was... less likable. There was always a dreamy, faraway look to his eyes that made you feel like he wasn’t all there. Even Cecil didn’t seem to know what he was going to do next. It was hard to have fun with a person who thought cutting off someone’s ears on a whim was a funny joke to play on a drunk partygoer. Even Cassandra had to tell him to tone it down a few times. 

Juno got the news that Croesus was remarrying from the stream executive/crime boss himself when he offered to make Juno a member of the family. Apparently, his new wife was looking to expand the family tree. His smile was a little too wide. There were cobwebs on his shoes. Juno declined, and got a broken nose for his troubles. 

In the weeks leading up to his termination from the HCPD, cobwebs found their way into the HCPD’s unused corridors. Juno, always his mother’s child no matter how he fought it, ended his corrupted career with a great deal of pain, fire power, and loss. Though he never went to visit her in her lonesome prison cell, he knew she would have laughed if she’d heard the news.

Rita wouldn’t let things go, as always. Juno looked for the truth, but not in the way Rita did. Rita  _ needed _ to know things, from her streams, from the Venusian Prime Minister’s personal email, and from the people Juno helped. And so, at her insistence, Juno opened a little office up for business. Juno Steel, Private Eye. 

When Croesus came to him the next time, asking Juno to save his son from mobsters, the cobwebs had crept up higher around him, sparkling on his suit and drifting from his hair. Juno took the case, and couldn’t even find it within himself to be surprised when things ended with his ribs busted and his wallet empty.

When Juno worked for Vicky, he didn’t see many cobwebs, but he did see just about everything else. Whenever she came to him for help with a case, he braced himself to see things that couldn’t exist, or shouldn’t, at the very least. Strange objects with strange histories and a habit of killing their owners. He wasn’t willing to chalk it all up to curses, but he’d seen too many strange things under her employ to write it off entirely. When his debts were gone, he couldn’t get out fast enough.

He was surprised when Sasha called, and even more surprised when he heard she was sending him to the Kanagawas again with a partner. 

There was something about Glass that made Juno’s eyes want to slide past him, but Juno forced himself not to lose track of the agent. The fact that Juno’s mind wanted to slip over the man made no sense, because he should have stood out like a shining star. He was too light, too beautiful, too ephemeral. Juno had spent his life surrounded by stream stars and models: people who had spent fortunes to look a few years younger, but there was a difference between a skin care routine and being utterly flawless. If Juno didn’t know any better, he would have assumed that Rex was just a dream that had charmed it’s way into the waking world. It was only his bright eyes and sharp teeth that assured him he was talking to a man made of flesh and blood. 

Min won, of course. How could she not? Sitting at the center of her web, spinning strings to send them flying through the house like puppets at her command. She had planned for all of it. Her little family had failed, for the most part. Cecil, of course, had been a success. Exacerbating his madness had been easy under her ministrations. As long as Min was careful about which doors she went through and provided him with a steady stream of victims, he was easily sated. The other two members of the family had been more difficult to control. Cassandra had always been drawn to the chase, but Min needed her close by, and even as a mob boss, Croesus had been too softhearted to give into the thrall of the mask, which urged its owners towards violence. 

_ Peter Nureyev. _ He felt the weight of the name on his tongue as he read it aloud to an empty apartment. Juno knew it was real. He was certain of it, in some deep primal part of himself that had never failed to tell truth from lies. He just didn’t know what it meant.

Nureyev looked different the next time he saw him. He was more human somehow. His movements were still graceful, his face was still smooth, but now it was an attainable sort of grace and beauty - if you were willing to spend millions on face creams and plastic surgery, that is. Astronomically out of Juno’s league, but theoretically attainable. 

And then they were off, conning Engstroms and fighting Valencias, stealing impossible cars, getting tortured, and locking himself in a room with a bomb and a mad archeologist who wouldn’t shut up about "birthing the extinction", whatever that meant. 

And then… there was a night, where nothing else mattered except the fact that the two of them had survived. 

And then it was over. Juno left. The walk home was obscured with clouds of white mist, rare on Mars because there was so little natural water in the atmosphere. 

Juno threw a cat out a window and watched as it exploded. Later, he sat in a park with an old man, and a pocket watch with a finely detailed spider-web pattern on it. It made him feel sick, but his mind slid around the reason why. He started working for the old man, going around from prisons to amusement parks to museums. Everywhere he went, he caught sight of cobwebs in corners and smelled rot. He could feel the strings tugging in his head, too. The eye the old man had given him pulled at his consciousness, guiding him like a dog on a leash, but he didn’t fight it. He didn’t trust himself without someone else behind the reigns.

It wasn’t until he went underground with Allessandra and Pilot that he decided to fight. Standing between the bodies of Pilot and the Piranha, and looking between Strong’s scared face and the endless desert, he realized that he couldn’t let Ramses control him. He had to take a stand. 

In the desert he met two rotting women and a man in a brown jacket. Each of them oozed history, thick and viscous and bloody. Spider webs appeared around Buddy Aurinko, with her rotting face and flaming hair, but she was always quick to stamp or wipe them away with a tight smile and whip up an excuse about not having a chance to clean. The Big Guy didn’t speak about his past, but Juno knew the type of history he must have had, with his hard eyes and the distant music that followed him on the wind. No one acknowledged it, but Jet grit his teeth whenever a few notes were audible. Vespa Ilkay, with her rotting mind and lying visions, had the smell of a wolf, and you could see a trace of a hunter’s craftiness when her eyes unclouded for a few moments.

Juno got his eye removed, and learned the story of a man named Jack Takano. 

The city he returned to wasn’t the rotting carcass he’d left behind. The sickness that had pervaded every inch of the city had been replaced with strings by a man who toyed with people’s lives for his own desires. Juno fought Mick in his brand new apartment that had already managed to fill with cobwebs, and when he found Ramses dead, cocooned in the very webs he had tangled them all up in, he couldn’t help but feel like Ramses had served his purpose. The puppet master was a puppet himself, in the end. Now the Theias were out of his control, and they were going to spread their network of minds and bodies across the galaxy. Or they would have at least, if not for Rita. She saw what they had to do, and Juno watched the Theia’s tower crumble.

It turned out that Buddy hadn’t wanted them just for their skills as criminals. She wanted people who had been touched by the impossible and come out alive. Juno was willing to write off what she said about fear gods and avatars as religious mumbo jumbo, but the more she talked, the more Juno thought back to every impossible thing he’d seen and never looked into. He thought about a dead man, covered in webs minutes after his death. He thought about a woman with melting skin taunting him as they stood beside a lost city. He thought about a woman in an underground tomb whose body shifted in impossible ways. 

Buddy said she’d taken them in because they had proven strong enough to resist becoming full avatars, and she wanted to keep it that way. Vespa’s fall and subsequent corruption had weakened her connection to the Hunt. Jet had pulled himself away from the Slaughter through sheer willpower. Peter could have been a part of the Stranger, but his refusal to fully abandon his name had kept him as a man of flesh and blood. Rita had been drifting too close to the Eye for years, but apparently not even an all seeing entity could handle the amount of time Rita spent Knowing things about streams instead of people. Buddy admitted that the Web had had its sights on her for a long time, but she held it off by being completely transparent with her crew and doing her best to ignore the forces that made daily attempts to steer her life. 

As for Juno, well, as far as Buddy could tell, half a dozen entities had taken pot shots at Juno over the course of his life, but none had been able to take hold. He hunted criminals but never sought to punish or inflict pain. He looked for answers, but there were too many questions he was unwilling to ask. Even the Lonely had never gotten the opportunity to fully embrace him with Ben and then Rita at his side. 

Nureyev, now going by Ransom, didn’t seem surprised at the idea of rituals and gods and monsters. If anything, he looked like he was zoning out. In hindsight, it made sense that he would have known. 

As humanity had spread out among the stars, Buddy explained, the influence of the powers had spread and changed as well. Some, like the Vast, had been drastically weakened as humans learned to adjust to the new size and scope of the galaxy. Others, like the Web, Slaughter, and Corruption, had become more powerful than ever before. While the end of the war and a failed ritual in the outer planets (Peter grit his teeth when she said that, and Juno was reminded of a falling city) had considerably weakened the Slaughter, the other two remained powerful, and Buddy was certain that they were going to try their rituals soon. The Corruption had been weakened when the Web had cleaned away it’s foothold in Hyperion City by creating Newtown, and since both she and Vespa were still dealing with the effects of its radiation, they decided to make the Curemother their first target. The Web would come in time, but until they knew what it was planning, they could only watch and wait. 

Juno looked around the table at the tired, scarred faces of his new family. He thought about all of the people he’d lost to get here and the fact that he finally had something to blame for all of the misery in his life, in the lives of all of Oldtown’s citizens. He was ready to get some payback. 

**Author's Note:**

> Look. I have to leave for work in five minutes so let's make this fast. COMMENT OR DIE AT MY HAND. ALSO CREDIT TO @aesphantasmal on tumblr for the art.


End file.
